We are at a point where huge investments in renewables are becoming a reality, but the damage is already done.
Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. The plants can be built near the places the power is needed and / or in places where the required grid already exists, and they inherently produce steady power on demand. Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today.
Without it, or a series of technological breakthroughs in renewables, we'll just end up with an overall mix of renewables supplemented by coal and natural gas -- which isn't going to be enough. And it's not good to bet the world on the hope that we have some technological breakthrough.
Given enough time, we might instead focus purely on solar and wind, but we don't have enough time. We need to get to zero net emissions as soon as possible, and we need to use all options available to us if we want to take climate change seriously.
> Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. [...] Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today.
If I understand you right, you're saying that nuclear would be a feasible "drop-in" solution for coal/gas to solve the inconsistency problem of renewables. This is precisely /not/ the case, as nuclear power plants are extremely slow to adapt to sudden changes in the power grid (to get a feeling, a short research suggests that the shutdown time for a Pressurized Water Reactor, common e.g. in France, is about 90h [1]). Since crucially nuclear power cannot address the shortcomings of renewables, you still need a way to deal with high-frequency supply/demand changes (gas/coal/hydrogen/batteries/connected grid). Then you can decide whether you prefer covering the baseline with nuclear or renewables.
You can choose to use both, but you could also argue that why bother with nuclear in the first place if you can "usually" cover all your needs with renewables + some dynamic technology and then cover the gaps (no wind no sun) by maxing out your dynamic technologies. This might have high CO2 emissions in the moment, but is still amortized small.
Finally, electricitymap.org[2] gives a great overview of how the energy is composed in different countries.
Yes it is the case. Nuclear power plans are typically operated at baseload mode, where they run at their max capacity whenever online, but this is not a necessity of the technology.
Shutdown times are long, yes, but you don't shut down a plant to vary its output. Shutdown and start up times are long for many plants, independent of fuel. For example, most steam turbine natural gas and coal plants take more than 12 hours to start up.
Since you referred to France as an example, I'll use them too. France's EDF believes they vary their nuclear output by as much as 80 percent twice per day once renewables make up a significant contribution to overall power. They're currently equipped to handle swings as big as 21 gigawatts in under 30 minutes.
> you can "usually" cover all your needs with renewables + some dynamic technology and then cover the gaps (no wind no sun) by maxing out your dynamic technologies. This might have high CO2 emissions in the moment, but is still amortized small.
The math doesn't work out this way. We'll need to 3x our worldwide energy production by 2050. Developing countries are reaching for coal to do this because they aren't willing to pay the premiums required to make renewable energy work consistently. Energy storage needs to get an order of magnitude cheaper, or we need low carbon ways like nuclear to smooth that output.
On the map you shared, the majority of gray areas look like India does, and they're going to use a lot more energy in the next 30 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
- nuclear weapons. This is where Greenpeace actually got their start and where the "peace" comes from in their name. Most uranium designs require enrichment to some level and can also be used to produce plutonium. This is not a dead consideration; see Iraq's controversial civilian nuclear programme, and the ongoing war between a very large nuclear-armed rogue state and the proxy forces of the nuclear-armed West. Are you comfortable with a nuclear power plant in every country?
- terrorist and other attacks. The Ukraine war has seen fighting around Chernobyl, and actual shelling of Zaporizhzhia. https://theconversation.com/russian-shelling-caused-a-fire-a...
- nuclear waste. Again a big issue for Greenpeace in the 80s; admittedly this has massively improved. Note that there is both "high level" waste which can be reused as fuel, "high level" waste which cannot be used as fuel, and a much larger amount of contaminated normal materials. Some of which are less radioactive than naturally occurring rocks.
- choose your poison: CO2 is a slowly rising problem. Nuclear power plants are a "black swan" distribution; mostly perfectly safe, but the disasters that have happened have affected huge areas.
An additional practical consideration:
- cost and time overruns. Hinkley Point C is projected to have a 50% cost overrun and to be completed 17 years from its initial announcement. Even if we were to decide to roll out nuclear power, we must keep up the rate of renewables buildout (now considerably cheaper) because it will take decades for the plants to actually be built.
I do think the SMR concept is worth giving another go. nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers are already small modular reactors with great safety records. We must not bet on it alone.
Thorium seems to be a nerd trap; nobody seems to be trying this commercially, and since it can't be used for weapons there's no government subsidy as there was for the original buildout of uranium based plants.
Molten salt has unsolvable materials science / plumbing issues: it's too corrosive.
I think this is the most over-hyped point. I used to think this was a big issue, but we're talking a swimming pool of spicy rocks for an entire nation.
this is a problem we are capable of dealing with
The absolute volume is kind of irrelevant because many of these substances are very dense.
A _swimming pool_. Literally more readioactive crap from outerspace hits the ocean every year than this.
And no, The absolute volume does matter. That is non-sensical and nonsense. There's more uranium in sea water that humans would put every "pollute" it with
Co2 + all air pollution around the coal/gas power plants. On average they're still more harmful than an occasional nuclear plant failure.
In the left corner we have a coal plant. In the right corner we have a nuclear plant with the same output, as well as a reprocessing setup.
They run for a year, both have produced waste. We dig identical landfills for both of them and bury the waste.
Next year we need to dig a new landfill for the coal plant, but the nuke one has plenty of space left.
10,000 years from now the nuke landfill finally fills up--but the first waste we have put in it has decayed to ambient and no longer needs any special storage.
Accidents: The worst nuke has ever done is no worse than normal operation + unfortunate weather has done with coal many times. With even halfway decent safety measures we should be looking at Fukushima as the worst likely event--and note that the death toll ascribed to Fukushima is purely political, had they not evacuated the city the expected death toll was zero. I wouldn't advise farming around there for a while but otherwise it should have been life as normal.
Weapons: At the nation-state level you can't prevent this. At the terrorist level there's a pretty simple defense--your reprocessing plants put some of the waste back into the fuel. Most of the waste that builds up is irrelevant to the reactor, it's a few neutron absorbers that cause the problems. Take those out, put the gamma emitters back in. Even new fuel rods are therefore wickedly hot. Since both the reactors and the reprocessors already have the robotic equipment to handle the wickedly hot spent rods this causes only very minimal issues, but it makes stealing material very dangerous and very easy to spot--you can't hide a gamma emitter with any shield you can smuggle out.
I will object about the small reactors, though--we do *not* want shipboard reactors for civilian use! To keep them small enough those shipboard reactors are fueled with weapons grade uranium.
Your assertion is that all the precautions around Fukushima are entirely spurious, and that everyone involved is wrong about the risks, and that you're right and the risk is much lower? I can't help but feel I've heard this a lot during covid. Is there any evidence?
That's not just an area, that's the whole world and it's effectively permanent. That's coal at work.
As for the risks of Fukushima: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
I’m pro nukes (best phrasing), but it’s understandable why people are scared of it. I hope that the costs can come down and we can start doing some small scale experiments to show the reliability and safety. Most people just don’t have experience with the recent tech.
On my side I would say I'm "pro" nuke a) by default (because I can't see an alternative as to how we could reasonably achieve stable renewable with current tech on a short enough timescale) and thus b) as a transition technology.
I mean, I hate the waste, the impact of a catastrophic event can be terrible, but when taking a step back it feels like peanuts compared to the global scale and very real impact of what's currently happening, and for which we need to hit the brakes, like, yesterday, and continue to do so real hard for a very long time.
The problem is that the safety standards are to make them as safe as reasonably possible--this *inherently* means they're going to be too expensive because if they weren't that means it would be feasible to improve the safety. We get huge cost overruns because the safety standards get changed in construction and they have to go back, reevaluate and modify. And because the greens manage to tie things up in court causing delays.
Instead, I would like to see (generally, not just in this case) that safety say twice as good as the best alternative is deemed good enough. (And note that solar and wind are not alternatives without a suitable storage system--which doesn't yet exist. The best alternative is natural gas--and it turns out my memory was faulty, natural gas is two orders of magnitude worse and coal is three orders of magnitude worse.)
They absolutely do. Where do you think that radioactive soot goes?
I assume you mean this empirically, not based on the actual risk profile.
The cost, in lives, of a major nuclear containment failure is easily in the millions to tens of millions. The cost, in lives, of a major coal disaster is at worst maybe in the hundreds, even in principle.
So it comes down to a belief in whether we have properly contained the risk. My priors on this shifted tremendously after Fukushima.
> My priors on this shifted tremendously after Fukushima.
I'm curious why, despite Fukushima being pretty close to the worst-case scenario with modern technology, you feel these are mutually compatible feelings?
I mean, we all know what the worst-case scenarios actually look like because we have deliberately triggered containment failures for military purposes. Are you comfortable with the idea that nuclear reactors may melt down, but if we're lucky they will have minimal impact? Before Fukushima I feel like the message was unambiguously that meltdowns in modern technology are impossible. Now I do not trust that message.
Russian Roulette is not safe because nobody got shot in the first two rounds. The turkey is not safe because he was well treated through October.
Containment failures of nuclear reactors have a very large upper bound of damage.
This is an empirical argument.
Is the upper bound of damage higher for nuclear reactors or fossil fuels?
Sure, if you completely ignore what's coming out of coal plants' smokestacks day in and day out. Every day that coal plants exist and operate is a major coal disaster.
The worst of the worst, Chernobyl, where there was a design issue, the design skimped on many safety features, and everyone involved was incompetent or ignorant, result in a few tens of direct deaths and few tens of thousands of premature deaths. Where are you getting millions from?
Specifically regarding Fukushima, less people died from the nuclear disaster caused by the tsunami than an oil tank fire caused by the same tsunami.
We have deliberately initiated containment failures for military purposes -- we know what this looks like.
After Chernobyl we were told that it was a design failure compounded by human failure, etc., etc., and that in a modern reactor, meltdown was simply not possible.
Then Fukushima melted down.
So my priors right now are that we can not place a good bound on the total odds of a meltdown. How confident are you that with a modern reactor a meltdown is impossible? How confident are you that in a meltdown scenario the impact will be small?
How to weight a .00(0000)1% chance at tens of millions of affected, versus the guarantee of millions of life-years made worse by the actual coal plants? That is a philosophical plan, but the likelihood * badness is one approach. We also appear to have good control over the worst case situation with a plant - it looks to me like a bounded problem space with modern nukes.
As has France with their nuclear fleet.
So mocking a Green Party for being factually correct, pragmatic and effective in achieving their aims seems a bit cheap.
Sometimes feels like people only like nuclear because it lets them talk smack about Greens. Who are generally well educated people with sensible ideas. So why are we attacking them again?
Just wait until everybody really does have a ton of renewable energy, and you get headlines like "<area> ran on 100% renewables all week!", and thus it seems obvious we don't need the gas plants anymore. Except, that is, for when there's no wind or sun, then you absolutely need them.
But why would companies keep those plants going, when most of the time nobody buys energy off them? They'll just shut them down, since they'd just lose money keeping them online -- resulting in massive outages at times without wind/sun.
Meaning the government will have to subsidize carbon-belching gas plants just to keep them open.
Which is most quickly done by installing renewables and not running the existing gas plants.
I have no real objection to paying money to firms that keep gas plants ready for use. It's the money going to the people who sell the gas that I fret about. And again, the quickest way to reduce that flow is building more renewables, now.
Yeah well, you're one of the good ones then. I expect that to be a real test of faith for greens and small-government liberals both.
But in the mean time it's become clear that the biggest climate problem we have is not nukes, it's carbon -- and nuclear energy is really great in that respect: it doesn't produce any at all and it's reliable 24/7, and relatively cheap. It has a massive NIMBY problem, but ok.
So while that's clear to anyone who thinks rationally, for green party types it requires changing their mind, their entire point of view, one they've held for maybe decades: nuclear energy is now good, we need more of that and less of the other.
Some simply will not be convinced no matter that the facts have changed. Some turn to the whole "everybody must now ride bicycles and live off the land".
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion with somebody who believes in the green cause so strongly they joined a political party? I have, and it's painful -- not unlike trying to convince a religious fundamentalist that there is no god. It's all dogma.
This is why many of the next generation reactors are focusing on reducing/eliminating those costs. We all know that nuclear energies are extremely competitive regarding fuel costs, operational costs and carbon emission. The issue is the large question marks I mentioned above so everyone in the industry is working on that. Remember, energy production is largely an infrastructural (thus political) issue, so public support is an essential part of decision making. Hopefully, there hasn't been much investment in nuclear fission technologies for a while, so we might have plenty of headroom to eliminate these uncertainties.
Here are the wholesale electricity prices for next winter in various European countries. Look at the France-Germany spread! https://twitter.com/GoldbergNic/status/1542103521524424704
There's a reason why we had to turn on our old coal plants again.
And, all the while being a major electricity exporter itself (towards e.g Poland), Germany also depends heavily on electricity imports from... France's nuclear generators.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/electricity-export...
TIL that Germany's inroads into green electricity production is more or less offset by its electricity exporting economy.
Also Germany was a major exporter of reprocessable nuclear waste towards France (2nd place with 17% in reprocessed material at la Hague, 1st being France with 70%). That's old data though, IIRC they shut down 3 reactors (out of 6) since, the three remaining ones were due to shutdown this year but this is being reconsidered because gas x Ukraine.
Renewables + storage is about 1/3 the price of nuclear and a new plant can go from proposal to delivering power in under 2 years. Nuclear takes more than 20 years.
I'd rather have 3x as much CO2 reduction per dollar 2 years from now than 1x as much 20 years from now.
Even as little as 5 years ago nuclear was a good choice. But renewables and storage have overtaken it.
What storage that can provide the same availability and stability as a nuclear power plant? There is no such deployment today, and many of those planned are based on theoretical designs, and are thus with theoretical costs.
Nuclear plants are quasi-stable. They can work properly for years, lulling their users into a false sense of security. But they do have occasional failures, resulting in massive outages.
A solar plant can withstand a Russian missile strike. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/02/ukrainian-solar-plant...
Also as you are claiming nukes are take to long to build can you provide evidence of how long it would take to build and install enough renewables to output 1GW of power at all time? You would have to have massive battery farms to do this, so those must be included too.
You claim it takes under 2 years to get a renewable up yet a quick google search returns taking between 16-20 weeks for 1MW so 1GW (average output of one reactor) would take 16 weeks * 1000 so 16000 weeks. Which is 307 years.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
The US is adding 30GW of renewables in 2022 alone. It's expected to add over 50GW in 2023.
The 2.3GW of nuclear at Vogtle 3 & 4 cost $28.5B. The first permit was applied for in 2006 and if it is lucky it will go online in 2023.
If we're breaking out the time machine to restore past wrongs then starting earlier on renewables that we know now are the future would help more than nuclear. As would preventing fossil fuel interests capturing the governments around the world.
But nuclear is cool tech. Right up there with pumped storage, geothermal, good insulation, heat pumps, EVs and carbon taxes as part of the family of cool tech that will help avoid climate catastrophe.
Sadly nuclear and to an extent carbon taxes seem to be used as a stick to beat people creating real change, doing the old "perfect is the enemy of the good" trick. Sad really, and will only tarnish their reputations in the long term.
I would argue yes, you can rationally arrive at that stance.
And solar/wind is still increasing in economies of scale. Current nuclear is not competitive and won't be, and there is no 10-year target price that any next-gen nuclear can reliably target without a ton of boondoggle incentives. Same with fusion.
In previous threads the nuclear people warn that all the nuclear engineers will age out if nuclear plants keep being decommissioned. This is a good thing.
Nuclear and next-gen are saddled with military who-cares-the-consequences-and-risks thinking combined with NIMBY regs that make it TOO difficult to approve. The hulking concrete dome designs that are what you're stuck with have fundamental design problems. The "industry" needs to be swept away.
In 10 years time, solar/wind/battery will stabilize long-term, and nuclear can consider designs that may be competitive.
Whatever the viability of LFTR engineering wise, this is the promise/advantage that any "next gen nuclear" needs to accomodate:
- breeds uses all the nuclear fuel, and can reprocess old waste (LFTR can do this)
- is meltdown proof (LFTR has the plug that will melt if reaction temp gets too hot and then the liquid disperses and neutron economy falls stalling the reaction)
- is scalable/compact (LFTR's test reactor was allegedly closet sized)
- has no shadow or cross-purpose design for nuclear weapons isotopes (LFTR is allegedly proliferation resistant). I suspect that PWR and solid fuel rod reactors "won" because the military got their isotopes.
In order to be palatable to the public, you need the LFTR capabilities, whether you do that with pebbles + reprocessing or some other scheme, but you NEED that full fuel use and closed cycle.
All these stories/posts are from "old guard nuclear" that handwave all the solid fuel rod design problems and dangers away. Honestly, good riddance to these people.
Mainstream nuclear power technology is easily repurposed to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. A corollary is that a world with no nuclear reactors is a world incapable of making nuclear bombs. If one considers nuclear war an existential threat on the same scale or greater than climate change, it may seem paradoxical to construct the tools that would proliferate that risk to fight another existential risk.
The knowledge of physics cannot be unlearned easily, unless you imagine our future as a Dune-like world with strict prohibition on physics knowledge and experiments.
That doesn't follow, just because <X> is one way to do <Y> doesn't mean you can't do <Y> without doing <X>.
It also doesn't really hold up in the real world - we had nuclear weapons before we had nuclear power plants. Admittedly we do refer to some of the devices used to make the first nuclear bombs as "reactors" (though they produced no electricity).
Plutonium production requires the reaction U238 + n => U239, decays to Np239 and then to Pu239.
However, there is also the reaction Pu239 + n => Pu240.
If you change your fuel out frequently you mostly get the first reaction, little of the second. If you leave the fuel in for too long you get a lot of the second.
Pu240 is a big headache for bomb makers. The problem is that you need to be able to *fully* assemble your bomb before it produces any substantial amount of heat that will interfere. It's not merely a matter of getting it past the critical point, you need to get it far past that point so the whole reaction goes before the heat blows it apart. There have been multiple criticality accidents in the atomic era--too much material in one place but assembled by ordinary forces. They're deadly to those nearby but they don't blow up much of anything.
Pu240 emits a lot of neutrons, it's prone to setting the mass off before full assembly is attained. If that happens you would have gotten a lot more boom for your buck simply piling up ordinary explosives.
- renewables went from 3 to 40%
- imports: 3.6 to 7.6%
- nuclear: 22 to 14%
- oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7%
- coal: 31.7 to 1.9%
Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart)
Can all these things be overcome? I don't know. Let's hope so. But in the mean time there's every reason to proceed cautiously here. It's certainly not a stop-gap while green energy comes online - projects are many decades in length.
I see this risk = Fallout x Probability. Even though the proponents argue that the tech is much more safer, the fallout is so huge and generational that its it neutralises the low probability of any accidents.
PS: I am neither for or against the nuclear tech.
https://mobile.twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1471538237739...
We have a word in French "foisennement" (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foisonnement#En_.C3.A9nerg.C3....): although it may not be possible to rely only on renewables without storage, it's also easy not to have such intermittent sources. Wind and solar compensate one another quite well when the grid is designed for that.
As we speak, one out of two French nuclear plant is offline. We had to restart coal plants recently.
Even RTE (>50% owned by EDF, a nuclear giant) says going 100% renewables by 2050 in France is both feasible and affordable: https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...
IMHO it's a false dichotomy to think that if I understand climate change to be an existential threat, then I must be in favour of nuclear. Other renewables combined with less energy usage could be my preference.
Nuclear as it exists is a finite energy source. We could have been in a similar situation if we doubled down on nuclear decades ago.
At some point, we will need to transition to nuclear systems built with different technologies, if they are feasable, which is still questionable, or other renewable energy sources, like solar and wind. No solution is going to be a magic bullet that solves the effect of climate change because it is the outcome stemming from several technological and social limitations.
2. Out current political systems make waste management impossible.
https://actu.epfl.ch/news/what-if-half-of-switzerland-s-roof...
Or the fact that we don't really know where to store 'normal' nuclear waste safely.
And the fact that it takes ages to build a nuclear plant.
And they are always late, and over budget.
And that solar power and wind power apparently are cheaper.
And yet nuclear is still safer per unit of energy than any other sort of power.
> Or the fact that we don't really know where to store 'normal' nuclear waste safely.
The quantities are tiny, especially compared to the fossil fuel plants they'd be replacing (said plants happily spewing their far larger quantities of waste into the atmosphere).
> And the fact that it takes ages to build a nuclear plant.
> And they are always late, and over budget.
Due to regulatory hurdles, NIMBYism, and the usual government expenditure bloat that affects all public works projects (at least here in the US).
> And that solar power and wind power apparently are cheaper.
Per kilowatt, that's doubtful - particularly once you factor in the batteries needed to make solar/wind a suitable replacement for nuclear.
If you're going to advocate we skip nuclear, then the best bet would be to advocate a push for geothermal. The Earth is hot 24/7, and using that heat for power is "simply" a matter of digging a sufficiently-deep hole.
The CEZ applied to the Shoreham reactor would make most of Long Island uninhabitable and in the event of a disaster there would be no practical way to evacuate the bulk of Long Island. In fact this evacuation concern lead to the decommissioning of the plant.
The CEZ applied to the Indian Point reactors would potentially make New York City north of Upper Manhattan similarly uninhabitable with similar evacuation issues.
I think Indian Point particularly should not have been decommissioned and replacing it with natural gas was a mistake but I am also empathetic to the concerns others have around safety.
I found this on pinterest. It is a 100km (60 rather than 40 mile) radius drawn around nuclear reactors in Europe so this is more coverage than the CEZ but you get the idea.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/55/bf/7255bfbc39be961a2742...
According to the IPCC, we can't wait that long to reduce our emissions.
What do you mean "we can't wait that long?" Any time we start reducing emissions is better than never. There will never be a "too late" point to reach net zero.
Secondly, what is the alternative to reducing our carbon outprint in 10 years?
2. There is no indication that we will be able to produce lithium-ion batteries with a high enough wh/kg density to create high enough energy storage capacity to replace carbon-based energy sources. Until such a time as that technology becomes possible and production-ready, we will need other sources of energy.
Not building nuclear with the assumption that grid-scale battery storage will become feasible is a potentially catastrophic policy decision.
Fission isn't Fusion. You can't run the entire planet on nuclear power.
Yes you can: https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
Its a short term solution but ultimately not the solution for sustainable environmentalism.
The reality is that there was a coordinated disinformation and obfuscation campaign made by Exxon, Shell, BP, et al. They sacrificed our planets Goldilocks zone for 50 years of corporate profit.
Certainly grab your pitchfork. This is a human atrocity that will soon trump all others. But the ones you should be skewering are sitting in boardrooms right now figuring out how to squeeze the last few dollars from our planet before wet bulb temperatures reach 50C.
Atomic energy will be seen as a free pass to consume more and more, worstening climate change.
Atomic energy isn't going to cause climate change. The total power we consume is a drop in the bucket compared to the solar incident energy.
I am still in favor but I see there are just huge non preventable dangers, mostly dependent on political or competency failures, something that just happens in human society
The modern world can’t run on renewables alone. It’s impossible.
Also true for nuclear.
It's not only possible, it's cheaper than many of the alternatives.
British Columbia gets 99% of its energy from renewables. It's electricity price decreased in 2022.
99 % is impossible. Storage systems to achieve 99 % don't exist yet.
The link to the Electrify book in my original comment shows how to get to 100% green electricity. It's possible. Not easy nor cheap, but possible. It uses existing nuclear because that's cheap and rational. It doesn't include building more nuclear, though because that would add trillions to the cost.
Let's take good foo. Foo has three producers, A can make them for $1/unit, B for $2/unit and C for $3/unit. If A can satisfy demand then the price will be $1 and B&C won't make or sell anything. If A&B can satisfy demand then the price will be $2. But if A, B & C are required to meet demand the price will be $3 while A&B will be rolling in the profit.
Therefore the fact that the price of electricity is going up commensurate with fossil fuel prices is good evidence that fossil fuel electricity is the most expensive source.
Solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels etc. are imperfect, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where a mistake can make a significant chunk of the earth uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
They are fewer than the US, USSR and Japan, but they are very capable of operating advanced technology. Advanced technology, specially the most recent and in this case, safer, is held from these countries for reasons has little to do with fear of a significant chunk being uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
Quite on the contrary, if fear of a big chunk of the countries being uninhabitable had anything to do in this matter, rich nations would be financing nuclear power plants to the poor to prevent sea level rise.
Climate change is an immediate existential threat as you say yourself. Seeing nuclear as the solution to that threat is very shortsighted IMHO.
Many commenters mention the threat of accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima. That is one aspect, yes. However, on the grand scale it seems as if humanity has limited the risk for these kind of accidents.
The much bigger problem with nuclear energy is that humanity has not yet figured out how to handle the waste on the short term. Let alone on a time scale that is beyond human comprehension.
I was quite impressed by the thorough analysis in this article:
https://bostonreview.net/articles/is-nuclear-power-our-best-...
Piling more nuclear waste on to the already unmanageable heap is irresponsible. That is why being against nuclear energy as the stop gap solution for climate change is not only reasonable but also responsible.
Yes we have. Breeder reactors. We just need to start actually using them.
There are many promises for technical solutions. Yet, none of them are actually used today for a myriad of reasons.
I agree with you. The ~250,000 tons of nuclear waste we have is a problem. However, we're even less well equipped to handle the ~50,000,000,000 tons of greenhouse gas waste we are generating per year today.
With nuclear waste the time scale is vastly different. For that we need to be able to plan for milennia.
It's a bad trade even assuming that we don't use those hundreds of years to innovate on the problem, but we should and are. For example, see the sibling thread, or look at TerraPower's reactor that runs off of spent nuclear fuel: https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-p...
1. Dig a very deep hole
2. Put the bad stuff in the hole
3. Undig the hole
Well hot damn I guess I've done thousands of years' worth of planning.
Frankly I find it difficult to believe that there are still nuclear supporters out there. Fukushima was thankfully somewhat small in impact, but let's not lose sight of the fact that there was a full-on containment failure -- an actual honest-to-god meltdown. I have been assured so many times by so many nuclear experts and proponents that this sort of failure mode is simply not possible anymore.
Given that the impact of a major containment failure can be extremely dramatic, with death tolls in the millions, what makes people think that we understand the engineering problem enough?
We're basically one major containment failure that is less lucky than Fukushima to completely invert those numbers.
People don't want to accept this fact in the same way flat earthers don't want to accept that Earth is spheroid. They want to live in their imaginary worlds simply because they're insane.
But, today, if we were all 100% nuclear, you still have to deal with the fact that battery tech is inadequate to replace fossil. I believe that once a miracle happens such that a superior battery magically becomes trivially available to anyone, demand for power and pure market forces will cut the throat of renewables and society will completely shift to nuclear.